


[Fandom stats] FFN vs. AO3: comments, reviews, kudos

by toastystats (destinationtoast)



Series: Fandom Stats [67]
Category: Fandom - Fandom
Genre: Cross-Posted on Tumblr, Fanwork Research & Reference Guides, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-19
Updated: 2015-01-19
Packaged: 2019-09-15 10:56:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,263
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16931982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/destinationtoast/pseuds/toastystats
Summary: Comparing various popularity metrics in 10 of the biggest fandoms (as of 2015).





	[Fandom stats] FFN vs. AO3: comments, reviews, kudos

**Author's Note:**

> Originally [posted on Tumblr](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/108603282634/about-the-question-whether-ffnet-is-less-active).

Anonymous said:

> About the question whether ffnet is less active than ao3 : I think one of the main reasons is that you can leave a kudo when you're not registered on ao3, and even come back and leave another if your computer was disconnected. A "fav" on ffnet requires an account, and is much more personal. I've received messages from authors asking me to leave a review after i added their story to my favorites.

Oh, interesting!  Thanks for this insight; I hadn’t realized you have to log in on FFNet to favorite something.  That means it functions more like AO3 bookmarks than kudos.  Time to revisit popularity metric comparisons between the two platforms.  (Previously, I’d looked at [AO3 popularity metrics](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/102920936231/toastystats-ao3-word-counts-dates-and) and gotten lots of reblogs saying that AO3 is “dead” compared to FFN).

I decided to look at how the main three approval metrics on AO3 (kudos, comments, bookmarks) compare in usage to the main three approval metrics on FFN (reviews, faves, follows).  I looked at these across 10 of the [biggest fandoms on FFN and/or AO3](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/108433335254/things-im-doing-instead-of-sleeping-getting) (Harry Potter, Naruto, Twilight, Inuyasha, Glee, Avengers, Supernatural, Sherlock, and Teen Wolf):

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipOc34nVzMGUtHz6t_OUpzZqak8B11x2DbT242Hv?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Your hypothesis that kudos are easier to leave than favs because you don’t need an account seems borne out by the fact that kudos are given in higher numbers than any of the other metrics.  But it looks like the complaint by some authors that AO3 is relatively dead compared to FFN depends on what metric you’re looking at.

Let’s delve into this more and also look at how this varies by fandom…

Quick methodology notes: The above graph actually shows the mean of the medians, across the 10 fandoms, despite slightly misleading labeling.  I don’t think it’s possible to easily get either the mean or the median number of reviews (e.g.) across all of FFN, so instead I gathered the median number for the 10 fandoms I mentioned above — the top 5 AO3 fandoms and top 6 FFN fandoms (with duplicates removed).  (I omitted metrics such as AO3 subscriptions, because you can’t sort by those, and AO3 hits, because those don’t necessarily indicate approval.)  The above graph shows the mean of these 10 medians for each metric.  (Which is kind of a weird way of getting an average; I’m open to other suggestions, but keep in mind that I can’t easily obtain the mean for individual fandoms, whereas the median is easy to obtain — just sort a fandom by reviews (e.g.) and then look at the page of results in the exact middle of the list to find the median reviews.)

Okay, so thats the average; FFN isn’t necessarily more active than AO3 — it depends on how you measure. But some of my readers previously hypothesized that FFN is more active than AO3 in the sense that you have way more _potential_ to get lots of reviews and faves, if your work gets really popular.  So to see if that’s so, let’s look at the maximum numbers of kudos etc. awarded across all 10 fandoms:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipOCejIksFhfdOSeQX6cJ-WxhL-BMwF33RH0ydfp?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

The main takeaway here is that jfc the Avengers fandom is enthusiastic with their commenting!  …No, wait… that turns out just to be one crazy fic with 36K comments.  Which is awesome, but let’s discard that fic for right now, because it’s an extreme outlier:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipPvfyK6McHOJQoU_-K5_Eb3Zkxc2QxywKO8MGV2?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Okay, by this chart, kudos are still the most awarded metric — but just barely.  The max number of reviews awarded on FFN almost equals the max number of kudos awarded on AO3.  And the max number of comments on AO3 is far less.

Most authors seem to most value comments and reviews, and they’re essentially the same thing in terms of both being free text responses (though the content seems to vary).  So let’s just compare those two metrics.  Are there more reviews than comments in all the fandoms?  Let’s look at the maximum numbers, still:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipPW7NPlNtWDx11mGnIkVz1LPyWxM3GaOcsjYMxk?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

This includes that one crazy Avengers fic — but even if you discard it, the max number of AO3 comments is still higher than the max number of FFN reviews.  That’s also true in the Sherlock fandom, and in the Teen Wolf fandom, the numbers are close to equal.   But for most of the big fandoms, the max number of reviews given to a single work on FFN far exceeds the maximum number of comments on a single work on AO3.  

It’s really interesting that it varies so much by fandom!  Some of this could be because some of these fandoms are a lot older than others, and FFN has been around a lot longer than AO3.  So let’s compare just the works updated in 2014:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipM4KK5KguwTOATdjf96F-rjYzgsm6mSlfd1AeFu?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Even so, we see the same pattern — in most fandoms, you potentially get far more feedback by posting to FFN than AO3, but there are a couple exceptions, and it varies a lot by fandom.

(Also: some of these fandoms were WAY more active in 2014 than others, and some of these seem to have greatly decreased in activity levels in recent years; these aren’t the biggest fandoms if you’re just looking at 2014.  But I kept the fandoms the same across analyses for comparison’s sake.)

Okay, so that’s the maximum.  Now let’s return to the average (median) per fandom:

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipO5BX-jeDxSyMJ0XAmWuowjg3-O5DbMEce70WI6?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Here we again see a lot of variance by fandom.  For Avengers, Sherlock, and Teen Wolf, the average amount of feedback received is about the same across the two platforms.  But for a lot of fandoms, the average shifts far in favor of FFN — and, in fact, the median is 0 comments on AO3, meaning that over half of the fandom’s works get no comments on AO3.

What if we just look at works updated in 2014 again?

[](https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipNfIAP2nBhjNxva3s1oYWyv_nDghuCmNa8INN4wE96IKzjWYKtksd627_5d-6cisA/photo/AF1QipMFxkqFnAdex4ib5dzqjglXlkUm_hJPk-AgyVv_?key=UzBPVlZCQ3p1S1VnWHVkM2tDR3lQNGs2VmRBM3BR)

Now the feedback disparity between the platforms has decreased substantially for Supernatural and Harry Potter — some of the reason for the big difference between AO3 and FFN shown in the previous graph is that FFN has been around a lot longer, and those fandoms were quite active before AO3 was founded.  

Interestingly, even though works posted in 2014 have been around a lot less time than average fanworks in a lot of these fandoms,  the average number of reviews received on FFN is higher when we look only at 2014 for the Inuyasha and the Twilight fandoms.  I believe both of these fandoms are past their heyday (it looks like Inuyasha canon ended in 2008 and the last Twilight movie came out in 2012).  But fans who are still posting works in the fandoms to FFN are, on average, getting more FFN reviews than ever before.  (The AO3 average has also crept up for some fandoms in 2014, including Inuyasha — but just from 0 comment to 1.  I’m guessing kudos have gone up more.)

**Conclusion**

Whether or not you’re likely to get more feedback on AO3 or FFN depends a lot on what fandom you’re in — the average and maximum activity levels both vary widely — and on how much you value kudos vs. comments/reviews.  It also probably depends on the average rating of your fanworks; FFN disallows explicit fic while AO3 doesn’t, and the [explicit fics on AO3 get far more feedback](http://destinationtoast.tumblr.com/post/65586599242/popularity-word-count-and-ratings-on-ao3-faq) than the other categories. (I did a [clearer illustration](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pgpITGSU0MAdAzmwgBCvm5Q7gKWutsZGCmSg2rEy0eU/edit#slide=id.g300ed4e48dc8f321945) of this for the Sherlock fandom at Sherlock Seattle — see [slides 57-59](https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1pgpITGSU0MAdAzmwgBCvm5Q7gKWutsZGCmSg2rEy0eU/edit#slide=id.g300ed4e48dc8f321945).)

There are all sorts of other reasons that go into choosing whether to post fanworks to one platform or both (and also to other platforms, like Wattpad).  But depending on the fandom, authors desiring feedback may end up preferring one site over the other.

[[Raw data](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1I-b9X1Kz9pir5MH7yAOJ3vKDAfWaQtC9-IcfjVXsqSA/edit#gid=0)]

**Author's Note:**

> Comments welcome, but I’m in the middle of a massive fandom stats backup due to Tumblr purge, so I may be slow to respond.


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